OSCON: Wrap-up

Now that I'm back from OSCON and had a chance to catch up on sleep, its time to look back on OSCON and comment on some of the trends I observed -- imagined or otherwise.

OSCON attendees and speakers tend to be easy going and there is a lot of good natured ribbing and poking going on. What was strange this year was that people were more frequently picking on Java than any other piece of software represented at the conference. I heard quite a few unrebutted Java insults -- whenever someone picked on Java, there were no responses sticking up for Java, just a general amused reaction from the audience.

And the perl camp seems to be feeling the heat from the python hackers -- I heard several comments from perl leaning speakers acknowledging python. And Dan Sugalski losing the Python-on-parrot-is-faster-than-python bet is another indication of the increasing rivalry between the two camps. I'll be curious to see how this shapes up next year.

My next observation was that it appeared that more female attendees were present this year. I asked Gina Blaber if O'Reilly kept any statistics on this, but alas they don't. I can see why -- I would probably be put off being asked my gender when I sign up for a conference. So, I only have my intuition to go on, but it certainly seemed like there were more women at this conference. It was also mentioned that general attendence was up -- I wonder if that influences the (im)balance of the genders.

This year's OSCON was the most intense so far (at least for me) -- judging by the number of session conflicts (more than one cool session per time slot) I had experienced and the number of attention grabbing keynotes and presentations I enjoyed. Big kudos to the conferences team for lining up a great variety of speakers!

Did you make it to OSCON this year? If so, do you have any reading-between-the-lines observations?